NRA: Mindshare releases text analytics platform

Mindshare Technologies, a provider of customer feedback management solutions, has unveiled two new products designed to help restaurant operators track and respond to guest feedback.

Mindshare Reveal is a text-analytics platform that gives restaurant operators the ability to extract structured, detailed information from customer comments. Mindshare partnered with IBM to develop the program, which extracts intent, sentiment, context and keywords from verbatim comments.

"Text analytics will really revolutionize all of the unstructured sources of data," said Mindshare chairman and founder Rich Hanks. "The computer is more accurate at grouping text analytics than we are."

Mindshare Coach is an application that takes customer feedback and in real time gives restaurant operators at the unit level recommendations on how to prioritize and respond to that feedback. Through data mining and statistical analysis, the program predicts which key drivers of customer experience will most likely improve satisfaction. It also uses analytics to recommend a specific plan of action.

"I believe urgency and responsiveness are two of the key differentiators for restaurant chains in the next 10 years," Hanks said. "Reporting is already robust and sophisticated ... and we will go through that data to find out what matters. When we do our analysis, it's not always the lowest scoring thing that's the most important to work on."

Mindshare announced the release of its latest product offering during the National Restaurant Association Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show. The show runs May 21-25 at Chicago's McCormick Place.